Plagiarism/Transcript
Transcript Text reads: The Mysteries of Life with Tim & Moby A mailman enters by the front door and rings the doorbell. A mailman hands the package to Tim. Tim: Thanks! Tim holds out a wireless card until Moby enters. Tim: Hey Moby, your new wireless card finally came! Moby: Beep. Tim: We'll just plug it in, and you'll be online in no time. Moby's eyes turn green like a scan, Moby's chest opens up revealing a BrainPOP website on it. Tim: Hey, this connection is pretty fast! Can we check our email? Tim presses the button in the email inbox, Tim reads it out loud: Dear Tim & Moby, I would like to find information about plagiarism. Can you help? From, Iris. Tim: Glad you asked, Iris. That's a very important topic; plagiarism is the act of submitting someone else's work as your own whether it's a science paper, a book report, or even making a piece of art. You can't steal someone else's words or ideas! Three examples appear on the screen. The first is a graph with several lines on it, the second is an outline for a book report, and the third is Moby holding up a painting of the Mona Lisa. Moby: Beep? Tim: Well, yeah. Some examples are pretty obvious! Say you have to write a report on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. You go on the Internet and find a great resource that tells you all about the book. If you copy and paste some of the text into your own paper and hand it in...well, that's a pretty clear example of plagiarism. A giant red uppercase letter "F" appears over the paper and a buzzer sounds to indicate that a person would fail that assignment. Moby: Beep. Tim: Yep! Copying from a source and passing it off as your own work is plagiarism, whether it's book, an article, an old paper your sister wrote... anything! Tim's report on To Kill a Mockingbird sits on a desk. Moby tapes his name on it, covering Tim's. A giant red uppercase letter "F" reappears over the report and a buzzer sounds. Moby: Beep. Tim: Well, when your teacher assigns you work, she's not asking you to copy someone else's ideas. She wants to find out how well you know the material and how well you can put your own ideas into writing. An animation shows Moby handing in his plagiarized report to the teacher. The teacher then hands the report back to him with a red uppercase letter "F" on it. Tim: Plagiarizing someone else's work is like cheating off someone else during the test. So if you're caught by doing it, you'll probably get a zero on the assignment. An animation shows Moby & Tim seated in a classroom, one behind the other. Moby looks over Tim's shoulder as they take a test. The teacher is standing nearby watching, and she clears her throat to alert him to her presence. Tim: Or if you're lucky, you'll be asked to rewrite it. In high school and college, you might fail the entire class, or face even harsher consequences! Images show a boy with a report card appears with a frown on his face. The report card shows that he failed English. Another image of the boy shows him getting kicked off of a college campus. Moby: Beep? Tim: It's not that you can't consult encyclopedias, books and websites for your assignments. In fact, you should use these sources. The key is you have to attribute, or give credit to your sources. For example, if you use someone else's words verbatim; that means quoted exactly, word for word; you have to put them in quotation marks. And every time you do this, you should credit the author. One of the easiest ways to do this is to use phrases like, "According to..." and then add the name of your source. You can also attribute your quotes in footnotes or endnotes explaining where the information came from. Finally, at the end of the paper you'll need to include a bibliography. That's a list of all the works you consulted when you wrote it. Moby: Beep? Tim: I was just getting to that. Many examples of plagiarism aren't obvious cut-and-paste jobs. In fact, a lot of students end up plagiarizing by accident! For instance, you might borrow a few key words or phrases from a source. See, the source sentence was "The timelessness of Lewis' prose lies in his imaginative use of allegory." and you wrote "The key to Lewis' timeless prose lies in his imagination and use of allegory." You didn't really paraphrase the material, or put it into your words, you just rearranged the sentence. You used a lot of the same words, and some of them are pretty fancy. I bet you don't even know what "allegory" means. If you can't explain something from your own paper without looking at your notes, you probably need to do a better job of paraphrasing. How about this instead: "Lewis's creative use of symbolic storytelling has kept his writing popular to this day." The thing is, though...we're still borrowing the source's basic idea that Lewis's symbolism has kept his work popular! Moby: Beep? Tim: Yeah, a lot of people forget that. You have to attribute borrowed ideas too, not just words. It can be tricky untangling your own ideas from your sources, so when in doubt, give credit! There are a few other ways to guard against accidental plagiarism too. If you're taking notes from your sources, put big quotation marks around all direct quotes, even if you're only keeping a few words. And write the name of your source next to every single note you take whether it's a website, book, or an article. These are pretty simple strategies, and if you can use them properly, you can avoid major trouble. Moby: Beep. Tim: You already wrote that on your blog? Moby's chest reveals to be Moby's Blog inside too. Moby: Beep. Tim: Huh. Must've gotten stuck in my head from when I read it a few months back. Moby: Beep. Tim: What? I didn't do it on purpose! A giant red uppercase letter "F" appears on the screen and a buzzer sounds to indicate that Tim plagiarized Moby. Tim sighs. 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